KDE today celebrates its semi-annual release event, releasing new versions of the Plasma Desktop and Netbook workspaces, the KDE Development Platform and a large number of applications available in their 4.5.0 versions. In this release, the KDE team focused on stability and completeness of the desktop experience.

It's not there. Comparing against GNOME makes sense. The rest is just absurd.

Don't be such a hell-bent fanboy. UI is UI, no matter the OS, and comparing one UI to another is perfectly valid if they are meant for similar usage situations.

While I love GNOME and Linux generally I've come to similarly love the way Win7 handles applications on the taskbar: all windows are grouped together and when you hover over the icon for the application it shows you them all neatly together as thumbnails, and you can hover over any of them and all other windows are hidden and that particular one brought forth. Sure, it could be brought to Linux too, I doubt it'd take much code to f.ex. add a Compiz plugin for such, but it's still a good, reasonable UI feature that's not yet present under Linux AFAIK.

I've come to similarly love the way Win7 handles applications on the taskbar: all windows are grouped together and when you hover over the icon for the application it shows you them all neatly together as thumbnails, and you can hover over any of them and all other windows are hidden and that particular one brought forth. Sure, it could be brought to Linux too, I doubt it'd take much code to f.ex. add a Compiz plugin for such, but it's still a good, reasonable UI feature that's not yet present under Linux AFAIK.

Thanks for linking to my applet.
However, it does not emulate all of the functions of the taskbar of Windows 7. There are no launchers and no extended context menu. And applications can't put widgets in the preview area. And I should really update the animation code (so it uses kinetic). Gah I'm so very much driven by whatever happens to interest me at the very moment. Currently I write (or have written) nonsense in JavaScript (optimizing brainf*** compiler and command line option parser) and don't work on Smooth Tasks.

As you can see from the "Task manager Settings" dialog box shown in the above link, in the "Grouping and Sorting" section there is a pull-down labelled "Grouping:". There are three options that can be selected, the one shown is "Manually", the default is "By Program Name", and the other option is "Do Not Group".

Grow up. Fanboy is for children. I'm over 40. KDE is not on the level of OS X, period.

Next I'm going to be told that Qt's Embedded platform is ready to surpass Android, let alone iOS.

Perhaps you think KOffice is going to supplant InDesign, Quark, hell even Scribus for document processing, or Photoshop, Painter 11, Excel, Calc or Numbers, not to mention Pages or Keynote, etc.

What does Gimp, Inkscape and Scribus all have in common? They aren't native KDE designed applications.

Some applications in KDE are excellent. Kate leaps to mind. Kile is another champion for traditional TeX/LaTeX publishing. Okular is solid and Digikam is fantastic.

What part of that list is not previously duplicated on OS X or Windows?

KDE is fixated on Plasma. 90% of it does absolutely nothing for productivity.

VLC is written in Qt for cross-platform. Amarok is an eye soar I avoid like the plague which is half baked and seems to have phonon sound issues in Debian KDE 4.4.5. Configuring phonon via sound just crashed it.

VLC plays like a dream.

Dare I have to ask about Audio/Video in OS X? No. It just works. Safari 5.x and WebKit Nightly smoke. WebKit2 is nearly ready. HTML5 compliance is nearing completion. Opera is way off. Chrome and Safari, not to mention Epiphany [great little browser] are way ahead.

There are lots of solid parts in Gnome and KDE. Gnome for consistency [albeit more subdued] is not a rip apart and start over ala KDE 4.x. If they are smart, GNOME 3 can avoid KDE's claims that seem to persist--claims beyond it's capabilities.

Blender 2.5 is humming along. It's not a KDE application.

I'm not interested in the Social Desktop Environment for Linux.

I'm interested in the highly productive, multi-tasking Desktop Environment for Linux for development and applied Engineering. Finite Element Analysis, OpenCL/OpenGL, etc. KDE is not interested in these areas.

The "it just works" myth in OS X is just that, a myth. I frequent a couple of non-tech sites that also have a huge contingent of Mac users, and I can assure you that they have tons of problems with getting streaming video to work (unless it uses Flash, of course, in which case it simply sucks). Video streamed upside-down or just not being shown at all.

And iTunes is a resource hog and probably the only half-decent music player for OS X. If you dislike it, well, tough luck. It's all there is.

Edit: of course, when Mac users don't get things to work, it's the world's fault (proprietary Microsoft solutions that OS X only half-assedly supports), and when it doesn't work with Linux, it's the fault of Linux. Of course everything "just works" when everything that doesn't is the fault of someone else.

Well all I said was that we like every one else, we don't get it perfect, as you said we get it better than others in some areas, and worse in other areas.
I can tell you that we lack a bit in designers, we need more, and we need to coordinate them, one off my personal goals in the oxygen adventure was to create a much more friendly environment, for designers and cooperation between all elements in the creation of this desktop.

are we as good as macosx? duno, maybe not (personally I'm not a fan).
But should we give up? should we not compare what we do worse and better? I don't think so.
Many of the things we created on KDE and Gnome are now visible in mac and windows, and this is a good thing it provides a better experience to all of us.

Plus and most importantly, its a lot of fun to do, and in the end its the key factor here, we do it because we love it. and nothing cant take that away from us. Have fun.

Fanboy has nothing to do with age, it's about attitude. You know, the inability of hearing critics of a subject one holds deeply important to oneself and the belief that there can't be anything better than what one uses oneself.

KDE is not on the level of OS X, period.

First of all, that's subjective. Secondly, I haven't used KDE4 much but given how horrible I find OS X I consider almost anything better than it. That's an opinion though and in no way a general truth.

What I do claim as a general truth though is that one should be able to discuss not only the strengths of one's preferred OS/DE, but to also be able to admit its deficiencies.